Curse the Rabbit Hole

So I'm going to be doing something (not here but over there) that leads in with a consideration of Kevin Kelly's now-internet-ancient "1,000 True Fans" trope.  I went to take another look at that article to refresh my memory.  Instead I fell down the rabbit hole of the undiscussed internet, again, specifically with the odd sidenote of Fundable Dot...

Well, "dot what?" is sort of the issue.  I noticed that Kelly discussed using a crowdfunding site (in this 2008 article) whose core arrangement seemed nearly identical to Kickstarter - but Kickstarter wasn't founded until 2009.  A current search turned up Fundable.com - a corporate start-up site that appears designed to leverage the JOBS Act (one of those phantasms like Low Power FM Radio that seems to generate huge buzz when it's a maybe and relatively vanishes when it becomes an actuality - I'm sure it is happening out there but I've never to my knowledge listened to a LPFM station and I've yet to read any stories about a true JOBS Act-enabled crowd-funded start-up.

But its irrelevant here, Fundable.com was founded in 2011.  What gives?

Then I noticed Kelly actually linked to Fundable.ORG rather than .com and followed this to a very simple website of mostly church-basement scale fundraising ideas (nothing wrong with that, but nonetheless a sharp contrast to the seeming ancestor-apparent of crowdfunding's big gorilla Kickstarter that had once gotten a nod in what looks to be Kevin Kelly's most popular Technium article ever).  Hints of a scandal on the front page, which eventually led me to this Metafilter article which appears to lay out the nail in the coffin (and is primarily notable for the nascent and brief-lived phenomenon of people complaining about not being able to get into the Kickstarter beta, also the comment "Is this something I'd need Google Wave to understand?" which is obviously pretty funny).

Upon my review I wouldn't call it a scandal so much as a business and PR failure.  A little additional scrounging around the principal actors reveals little except that the original Fundable's non-programmer founder was quite bitter about Kickstarter, as of 2010 anyway.  I can see why, in this context, but this is a story that lays out one of the cold truths: the idea is not sufficient.  Coming up with an idea doesn't entitle you to anything.  You can complain if you like but in a few short years you'll have been forgotten.  Hey, I came up with the iPod in 1999 (I can't remotely demonstrate that this is the year I wrote that essay but it is - not that it matters) and invented crowdfunding in 2005!  And it would have worked, too, if I had more than 15 people in my "crowd"!  But I'm not bitter.  I am filled with love.

Unintended consequences cause brain-hurting efforts to figure out exactly what constitutes irony

Update... the site in question is back up (on and off) which makes this less funny (if it was in fact funny in the first place); in any event I guess you can see what the ding dang hoo haw is all about for yourself now.

So, humorous legal ripostes to dumb-ass cease-and-desist notices are funny which is why when middling-sized township West Orange, NJ sicced its lawyers on some fellow for running a website that featured the-township-name-dot-info - ostensibly due to some "falsely create the impression blah blah blah" B.S. but probably actually because his website said the Township Fathers were dumb jerks or something, the website owner's pro-bono lawyer's droll retort ended up on buzzbuzz.info.  Or someplace like that.  Which got dugged on Digg which probably still means something though definitely not what it did in, say, August 2011.

Which I suppose has caused all and sundry to become aware that the Township Fathers of West Orange, NJ are indeed kind of dumb jerks because of UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.  That's irony... right?

But wait!  On the heels of this publicity foul-up I typed "westorange.info" into my browser to see what the all the ding dang hoo haw was about and apparently I wasn't the only one, as what I received was a 508 RESOURCE LIMIT IS REACHED, which is to say dude's cheap-ass hosting (that his lawyer held forth as one of the points of ridicule with which to lash said Township Fathers' Lawyer for behaving as if it could reasonably be mistaken for Official Township Websites) got hit like a Angry Birds Piñata by all the rubber inter-neckers like yours truly and was removed from off the line to cool off.  So as a result of protecting his website from illegal threat of being taken down dude ends up getting his website taken down.  508 UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES LIMIT IS REACHED.

P.S. so it looks like buzzbuzz.info remains (inexplicably!) up for grabs, so have at it!  Surely no one would try to sue you for "falsely create the impression blah blah blah".  Right?

The last dumb cell phone in America

An exaggeration, certainly, though when I ride public transport it doesn't feel like one.  The only time I see phones like this any more are in the hands of elderly relatives who as a general rule don't turn them on.  I'm not anti-technology but I am, as I've noted several times before, an egregiously late adopter.  Indeed I resisted the mobile phone revolution for an exceptionally long time (and used to quip that I considered being inaccessible by telephone to be a feature rather than a bug of going outside), until 2005 when I found myself frequently out and about with an infant in tow and it started to feel stupid and irresponsible to not avail myself of the technology.  I went for the absolute bottom tier, a barely internet connected Nokia on prepaid minutes.  I used its online connectivity exactly once, to email myself a photo of my child a friend had texted me.  In the midst of that transaction T-Mobile actually interjected a friendly message chiding me over the fact that my handset could not provide me with a "rich media experience".  Duly noted.  I probably made it about 3 years before I sent my first text.  I still basically despise texting.  It's battery finally started to go after 5 years, but I managed to forestall its demise by locating a alternative brand replacement (searching for batteries for the telephone was complicated by the huge number of dodgy aftermarket battery resellers, one presumes an outlet for Chinese electrotrash recyclers, who offered great prices but routinely generated unhappy reviews by individuals who insisted that they had been sold a clearly used battery as new.  I thought I might get another 3 years out of it.

To make a long and uneventful story short(er) anyway last night I did something I'd somehow managed to avoid for 6 years: I left it in the pocket of a pair of pants and proceeded to wash and dry it.  To its credit, nothing exploded and the only visual effect the process had on it was that it looked very clean.  I even suffered hope briefly when after apprehensively plugging it in for a few minutes it actually powered up, albeit with the T-mobile launch tune sounding a bit scratchy and garbled.  My contacts appeared to be intact.  Half an hour later though it was displaying nothing and plugging it in further elicited only a dangerous-sounding crackling hiss from the speaker.

Now what?  Though I, yes, despise texting and have been extremely comfortable rationing out an 8 to 12 dollar a month prepaid minute habit, I'm still wholly dependent on having the thing now and can't imagine going long without one.  I left the house on an errand this morning and was well out the door when I realized I had no method of telling the time about my person.  But what next?  The options are absurd.  I'm certainly not feeling up for a 50 - 70 dollar new monthly bill. Is there even such a thing as a prepaid smart phone?  This is exactly why I have been avoiding this moment for so long.  Its outcome, I'd guess, will end up as fodder for a subsequent posting.